Agglutinative languages, such as Korean, are synthetic languages where each affix typically represents one unit of meaning. In such languages affixes typically do not change form when combined with other affixes. Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes/morphemes per word, and tend to be very regular.
Morphological analysis of languages can be used to support computer-based applications, such as natural-language query processing required by search engines, by decomposing text input into affixes and lemmas. A common approach to morphological analysis relies on a small number of possible affixes, so that all possible forms for every word can be easily and efficiently synthesized. In non-agglutinative languages such as English, French, Spanish, and other European languages, only one affix may be attached to a word. These affixes may be maintained in a file or database together with a description of their morpho-syntactic meaning. These affix-lists are used in conjunction with predefined lexicons to analyze the words. However, in agglutinative languages such as Korean, each word may have multiple affixes in various combinations, making the naïve approach mentioned above unsatisfactory for automated word analysis of such languages.